Enterprises and organizations may have information located in many different and diversely located databases. For example, a manufacturing enterprise may have customer contact information in a sales department database, accounting database information (e.g., invoicing, accounts receivable, payment, credit, etc.) may be in another database, manufacturing department information (e.g., bill of parts, vendor, assembly instructions, etc.) may be in yet another database. Or, several departments may have customer information in each database, but the information may be listed differently for each database (by name, by account number, by phone number, or first name last, last name first, etc.). An information integration flow may define and/or describe the process of gathering the information in these databases and relocate the information to a common repository referred to as a data warehouse.
An information integration flow may be a series of instructions that may be responsible for extracting data from data sources, transforming the data, and finally, loading the data in a central data warehouse. The design of an information integration flow may proceed from a conceptual model to a logical model, and then a physical model and implementation. The conceptual model may convey at a high level the data sources and targets, and the transformation steps from sources to targets.